Posts filed under ‘Buddhism’

In the last line, Karmapa prays that unbearable compassion may be born within us. Now, it sounds as though unbearable here means that you’re so compassionate that you can’t stand it, and you scream and yell and jump up and down, something like that. But it doesn’t mean that. Zömay means that we are unable to ignore the suffering. We will not just go about our own business. Because of knowing what the potential of all sentient beings is, because of knowing that every sentient being is, in essence, a buddha, then we put our own effort into realizing Buddhahood in order to benefit all sentient beings. That is the idea of unbearable here. We can’t afford to be lethargic. Compassion is so strong that it will not allow us to be lethargic. It will not allow us to be selfish. That is what unbearable compassion is.

To make the transition to a life-sustaining society, we must retrieve that ancestral capacity–in other words, act like ancestors. We need to attune to longer, ecological rhythms and nourish a strong, felt connection with past and future generations. For us as agents of change, this isn’t easy, because to intervene in the political and legislative decisions of the Industrial Growth Society, we fall by necessity into its tempo. We race to find and pull the levers before it is too late to save this forest, or stop that weapons program. Nonetheless, we can learn again to drink at deeper wells.

We can enjoy a wider sense of identity than that prescribed by the Industrial Growth Society. It is both our birthright and our necessity for survival. Here are words from Arne Naess’ ground-breaking talk introducing the concept of the ecological self.

“For at least 2500 years, humankind has struggled with basic questions about who we are, what we are heading for, what kind of reality we are part of. Two thousand five hundred years is a short period in the lifetime of a species, and still less in the lifetime of the Earth, on whose surface we belong as mobile parts.

All that is has me–universal creativity, pure and total presence, as its root. How things appear is my being. How things arise is my manifestation. Sounds and words heard are my messages expressed in sounds and words.

All the capacities, forms, and pristine awareness’s of the Buddha’s; the bodies of sentient beings, their habituations, and so forth, all environments and their inhabitants, life forms, and experiences, are the primordial state of pure and total presence.

No one today can afford to be innocent, or indulge himself in ignorance of the nature of contemporary governments, politics and social orders. The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear: monstrous protection rackets. The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet except against oneself, the persons one is supposed to love, or the revolutionary aspirations of pitiful, poverty-stricken marginal societies like Cuba or Vietnam. The conditions of the Cold War have turned all modern societies — Communist included — into vicious distorters of man’s true potential. They create populations of “preta” — hungry ghosts, with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles. The soil, the forests and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of the planet is being fouled by them.

If as meditators, we have the limited intention to only express silent forms within the limits of our breathing, which we inhale and exhale through our limited karmic body’s obscured nostrils, then it is all right for us to be always bound by the limited space of our traditional cushions and to be reborn as nearly silent cows, except for an occasional moo. If we have the vast intention to be sublime meditators, then we must release our mind from concentration and relax in infinite natural clear awareness spaceless space. Whatever conceptions of existence and nonexistence arise, we can release them until our thoughts, like self-liberated cloudknots, become light ornaments of traditionless display.”